7 Best Restaurant Wishlist Apps to Save Spots

Updated July 21, 2026 · by the Crumble team

The best restaurant wishlist apps in 2026 are Crumble, which auto-clears saved spots the moment you review them, Google Maps' "Want to go" list, Beli, Mapstr, and dedicated list apps like To Eat List. Which one fits you depends on what should happen after you save a place.

Because saving was never the hard part. You already save restaurants — as screenshots, as half-remembered names in a note titled "FOOD", as Instagram bookmarks you will never open again. The hard part is the list staying useful: showing you what's nearby when you're actually hungry, and not silently filling up with places you already visited. That's the job a real restaurant wishlist app does, and it's the lens for this comparison.

The picks at a glance

1. Crumble — the wishlist that cleans itself

Crumble is a friends-first food tracker, and its wishlist is built around one mechanic no other app on this list has: the moment you log a review at a wishlisted place, the entry clears automatically. You never check anything off. The list only ever contains places you still haven't tried, which is the entire point of a wishlist.

What else sets it apart:

• Wishlist and visits on one map. Saved spots live on the same map as the places you've reviewed, so "what's near me that I wanted to try?" is one glance, not a cross-reference between two apps.
• Friends see where you're headed. Your circle's spots — visited and wishlisted — share one map, so a friend's "we should go here" actually surfaces when one of you is nearby. Friends-only by default: strangers see nothing.
• The visit gets a real record. When you do go, you rate the individual dishes on a half-star scale — so the wishlist entry doesn't just disappear, it turns into a memory of what to order next time.
• No install required. It's a Progressive Web App — open crumble.me, add it to your home screen, done. EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant, no ads.

Where it's not for you: the free tier caps wishlist size (Crumble Plus, from €1.99, makes it unlimited), and if you want a big public community around your saves, Beli's network is far larger. If private-by-default is exactly what you want, see our comparison of private restaurant list apps.

Start your wishlist free

2. Google Maps "Want to go" — zero-setup saving

Already on your phone: tap a restaurant, hit save, drop it into the built-in "Want to go" list, and a flag appears on your map. For sheer capture speed nothing beats it, which is why it's where most people's restaurant wishlists start.

Trade-offs: it's a bookmark, not a wishlist. Nothing happens when you actually visit — the flag stays until you remember to remove it, so after a year the list is an archaeology dig of tried and untried places. There's no rating of your own attached, and sharing means manually sending list links. Great inbox, poor system.

3. Beli — want-to-try inside a social app

Beli is best known for ranked been-there lists, but it also keeps a want-to-try list: save places from friends' activity or its recommendations, see them on your map, and move them onto your ranked list after you visit. If you're already tracking restaurants socially, the wishlist comes bundled.

Trade-offs: the wishlist is a supporting feature inside a leaderboard-and-feed app, not the star. If you don't want the ranking-against-strangers layer, you're carrying a lot of app for the list you actually came for.

4. Mapstr — tagged bookmarks for every kind of place

Mapstr saves any type of place — restaurants, bars, shops — on a private map organized by freeform tags. Make a "to try" tag and you have a wishlist; make "date night" and "cheap eats" tags and you have a filtered one. You can share selections with friends.

Trade-offs: the visited/want-to-try split is a convention you maintain by hand — the app doesn't know you went, so retagging after every visit is on you. It's a superb bookmark drawer, but food gets no special structure.

5. To Eat List — the dedicated to-eat list (iOS)

To Eat List is exactly what the name says: a to-do list for restaurants. Save places you've heard about, follow friends whose taste you trust and add their finds in one tap, and let the list re-sort around wherever you are — handy when you're traveling.

Trade-offs: iOS-only, and it's a small independent app, so expect a tiny network of friends to follow unless you recruit them yourself. Checking off a visit is still a manual step.

6. Cravinglist — the simple want-to-try checklist (iOS)

Cravinglist keeps a "Want to Try" list you check off, with personal notes on each entry — who recommended it, which dish to order, the deal that made you save it. It's the closest thing here to a purpose-built paper list with a search box.

Trade-offs: iOS-only and deliberately minimal — no friend layer, and the checked-off entry is where the record ends. If you want the visit to become a rated memory, you'll outgrow it.

7. Notes app or spreadsheet — the honest baseline

No judgment: a note titled "Restaurants to try" is free, instant, and works on everything. A spreadsheet even gets you columns — neighborhood, cuisine, who recommended it.

Trade-offs: notes rot. There's no map, so "what's saved near me right now?" is unanswerable; addresses go stale; and visited places accumulate next to untried ones until the note is a graveyard. It's the system everyone starts with and the reason wishlist apps exist. For the bigger picture of tracking systems, see how to keep track of restaurants you've been to.

What separates a wishlist app from a bookmark

Every app above can technically "save a restaurant". Four things separate a wishlist that works from a pile of bookmarks:

• A visited / want-to-try split — tried places must leave the list, or the list stops meaning anything.
• Auto-cleanup — the split should maintain itself. Manual check-offs get forgotten; automatic removal (Crumble's approach) doesn't.
• A map view — a wishlist you can't see geographically can't answer the only question that matters: "I'm here and hungry — what did I want to try nearby?"
• Friend visibility — most saved spots come from friends' recommendations, so a wishlist your friends can see closes the loop.

It's the same logic as Goodreads' want-to-read shelf, pointed at dinner — we've written up that full analogy in Goodreads for food.

How to choose

• You want the list to maintain itself and your friends in on it → Crumble.
• You want zero setup and don't mind manual pruning → Google Maps "Want to go".
• You're already ranking restaurants socially → Beli's built-in want-to-try list.
• You save more than restaurants → Mapstr with a "to try" tag.
• You want a single-purpose list app on iOS → To Eat List or Cravinglist.

And if you end up wanting to track the visits themselves — ratings, dishes, the full record — start with our pillar guide to the best restaurant tracking apps.

How we chose these apps

We build one of the apps on this list, so we owe you the method. Every competitor description is drawn from the app's own published materials — its website, App Store or Play Store listing — not our opinion of it, and we verified each app is real and currently available before including it. To qualify, an app had to (a) save restaurants you haven't visited yet as a distinct list, (b) show or organize them in a way that survives more than twenty entries, and (c) offer a usable free tier. We excluded pure discovery apps (Yelp, TheFork) because browsing strangers' reviews is a different job from keeping your own want-to-try list, and we kept the notes-app baseline in because pretending nobody uses it would be dishonest. Where another app is the better fit — Google Maps for capture speed, Beli for community — we say so in its section.

Frequently asked questions

Save your first spot today

Crumble is free, friends-only by default, and runs in the browser you already have. Save the places you keep meaning to try — and watch the list clear itself as you eat your way through it.

Open Crumble